You can listen to all the Nevermind Miami covers released to date on beachedmiami.com/nevermind-miami.

This is the first installment of Nevermind Miami, a tribute to the generation-defining album Nirvana released 20 years ago, on September 24, 1991. To commemorate the occasion, we have asked local musicians to cover each of the 13 songs on the original release. We will be posting the covers throughout September in no particular order.

It was the summer of 1997 when the opening riff of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” brightly burst out of the bombed-out speakers of my Sony boombox. The station was the now-defunct 94.9 Zeta, South Florida’s FM rock outlet for over 19 years before it was reformatted in 2005 as a Reggaeton station and then, ultimately, Spanish Top 40.

I was 11 and was listening in as part of my beginner’s education as a late-blooming “head banger”. You can bet rock and roll in north residential Miami Beach at the end of the ’90s came out looking funny. My mother only indulged big pants to a point but approved of my allowance money going toward Matchbox 20 and Third Eye Blind cassettes. Those Casey Kasem-friendly alt tapes built a bridge to Metallica CDs which, in turn, led to Zeta, which had a whole program devoted to the heaviest band I had ever heard.

Just in time for Brian Wilson’s August 5 Hard Rock Live concert (which I sacrilegiously and purposely left off this month’s top music events list), Miami-based classical string quartet Baby B Strings offer up their version of one of the Beach Boys’ best.

Baby B Strings is three former University of Miami music students — Belinda Ho (violin), Joshua Shepard (viola), Tony Seepersad (violin) — and current Cane Pilar Suter (cello). Ho formed the group in 2007 as a non-traditional outlet for pop-meets-classical interpretation.

“We like to play in unconventional spaces,” says Ho, who runs a monthly concert series at the Lotus House Shelter and has bowed her violin everywhere from Jackson Memorial Hospital to Churchill’s (in many ways, the opposite of a hospital).

“I like to take classical music out of its traditional context and make music accessible in everyday settings,” Ho says. “The juxtaposition is really interesting, and the reaction I get from people who don’t normally go to classical concerts is completely different. Seeing live string quartets is something that a lot of people don’t get a chance to experience.”